Technique and Tradition in Beckett’s Trilogy of Novels

This book discusses Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, the novels that make up Samuel Beckett’s well-known trilogy, to analyze the techniques employed and trace the traditions from which they have emanated.^R ^R The book is made up of an Introduction and six chapters. The first chapter discusses Molloy, viewing its protagonist as a writer who is alienated but as such serves as a modern-day Everyman. The second chapter discusses Malone Dies with particular emphasis on its mode of narration and considers phenomenology to be the key to the narrative consciousness of the novel. The third chapter discusses The Unnamable with the aim of examining its constituent elements, and the particular amalgam of fact and fiction. The fourth chapter discusses the Continental confessional aspect of the trilogy, examining such earlier Continental examples as Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther and Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. The fifth chapter discusses the Continental philosophical novel aspect of the trilogy, and situates the three novels within the framework of the post-World War II French philosophical novel tradition.